Argentina’s Banking Groups Are Quietly Building Peso Stablecoins for the Institutional Market

Digital Peso Stablecoins in Development in Argentina

While dollar-pegged stablecoins, like USDC and USDT, are popular in Argentina as dollar proxies, local stablecoins are in the sights of fintech companies.

A recent report from Iproup stresses that two banking holding groups are developing stablecoins pegged to the Argentine peso, focusing on offering programmable money services to institutions.

BIND Group, a holding with over $2 billion in assets under management, which owns BIND Banco Industrial, would be developing a peso stablecoin through BEN, its in-house virtual asset service provider (VASP). The conglomerate also announced a partnership with Circle to provide institutional access to BEN customers, supporting payments and treasury use cases in compliance with local regulations.

Petersen Group, which also owns several regional banks, would be developing the second initiative through a subsidiary with the support of Lirium, a company providing crypto-as-a-service solutions for Banco Galicia and Brubank. This offering, named DIPE, has already matured and has its own whitepaper.

These two initiatives have one thing in common: they are being advanced by companies backed by banking conglomerates but not by banking groups themselves, as the Argentine Central Bank has banned private banks from offering crypto-related services to their customers since May 2022.

The key target of these offerings would be the institutional sector, which would benefit from the smart properties of a digital peso for payments. The use cases for these initiatives would include treasury management operations, payments conditioned to an onchain event, and collateralized credit management.

While decentralized peso alternatives are already available, these offerings would have the support of banking groups behind them, with the possibility of escalating their use to private banks in the future, as the central bank is reportedly mulling lifting the ban on crypto offerings.

Nonetheless, in March, the argt peso stablecoin was targeted by the national securities regulator, which stressed that it constituted a security being offered without due compliance.